Hans Moravec was born in Austria in 1948 and has contributed influential work in robotics and artificial intelligence. He has also done work in the fields of transhumanism and space tethers (space elevator).

In 1998, in “Mind Children”, he wrote, “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

Project Summary
This is the final report for “Fractal branching ultra-dexterous robots,” also known as “bush robots,” a concept for robots of ultimate dexterity. A bush robot is a branched hierarchy of articulated limbs, starting from a macroscopically large trunk through successively smaller and more numerous branches, ultimately to microscopic twigs and nanoscale fingers. With its huge numbers of opposable fingers of all scales, a bush robot’s dexterity would greatly exceed anything known. A fully realized bush robot remains a prospect for the distant future, be we were able to investigate on paper some aspects of bush robot geometry, structure, actuation, control and fabrication. We produced animations of limited bush robots. After briefly investigating and rejecting as beyond our means several approaches to building actuated models, we built two passive bush robot models, one a handmade passively articulated mechanical model with a 16:1 size ratio between its largest and smallest limbs, and the other a static model made by a solid printing process called stereolithography, with an 81:1 scale ratio, and 19,683 (3^9 ) smallest fingers.